Dog in our footsteps

It has been hot here today, and though I've tried to get things done it has all been in slow motion. 

I did manage to take 200 empty seltzer cans back to the supermarket, which got me $10 off my shopping. 

And we said goodbye to our furry house-guest when his family came back from their vacation.  Though I'm sure he was glad to go home, I think he had a happy enough stay with us.  But maybe next time he'll decide not to lie at the bottom of the stairs disguised as an extra step, as I think we probably all trod on him at some point over the weekend.

Maine chance

We had an unexpected treat this morning - a visit from our friends the Exiles!

Well, it wasn't completely unexpected.  They two adult Exiles were at the same wedding as the Man yesterday so he invited them to drop by.  The younger Exiles had been overnighting at three different friends' houses, but they were all mustered together for some brunch on our deck and (for those that wanted to) a swim in the pool.

It was lovely to see them all again and to find out that their new life in Maine is suiting them.  We were just sorry that they couldn't stay longer, but they had to get started on their drive home - alas not a few minutes down the road any more, but a few hours across a couple of states.

Sunny Saturday

A beautiful Saturday...

...for the farmers' market - it was busy this morning! We stocked up on veg and snacks and admired Farmer Jon's very attractive chickens;

...for some yard work - the Girl cut down two failing trees (with modest trunks) in the backyard;

...for swimming with your best buddy, which the Boy did plenty of;

...for a June wedding.  I didn't go, but the Man has been up in Saratoga, wishing his work colleague and her new husband well.

School's out for summer

For the first day of the vacation...

The Boy got up early, the Girl slept in late.

The Boy and I cleaned dusty trains in the basement.

The kids and I took a trip to the Goodwill store to donate some stuff.  They didn't want our jigsaw puzzles, so we proceeded to the Salvation Army store and donated them there (it's where we'd got most of them in the first place),

We then called in at Brits R U.S. and treated ourselves to hula hoops and sherbet lemons.

Next door's dog moved in for a little vacation of his own.

The pool has seen some good use (thank goodness, not by the dog), including late-night family swimming to round off the day.

Blogger to bragger?

*PROUD PARENT ALERT* (If you can't stand that sort of thing, look away now.)

School's out.  Just a half day of mucking about for the Boy, though he did get the news that he has been promoted to "Accelerated Math" after many weeks of effort in his own time, with help from his dad, to get ahead in this subject.  Yay - well done, Boy!

The rest of us found ourselves in the High School gym this morning for the 8th Graders' Moving Up ceremony. 425 students plus a full complement of parents/grandparents made for a packed room.  The students processed in to Land of Hope and Glory played by the 8th Grade band (a surprising choice of music - just for us?  Surely not).  There were speeches by representatives of the school district and by the Middle School principal. And then prizes.

Totally without warning, the Girl was announced as a winner of the school's Principal Award for Artistic Expression.  So those lovingly illustrated school projects, too often the result of her pulling unsanctioned all-nighters, have not gone unrecognized!  We're delighted for her.  Here she is (if you're sharp-eyed enough) standing up to be acknowledged.

Every student was invited up to shake the hands of the School Board members and to receive a white envelope containing their certificate of surviving Middle School moving on to High School.  Also in that envelope, for some, was an additional certificate - bearing the signature of President Barack Obama.  The President's Award for Educational Excellence recognizes three years of high attainment, plus a top score at State level in English or Math.  And yes, our Girl got one of those, and yes, we're tremendously proud of her.

On his bike

The Boy usually lugs a ton of stuff to school each day - a backpack and something called a trapper keeper which is a sort of filing cabinet disguised as a satchel. The weight and awkwardness of this baggage has always deterred him from biking the mile and a bit to school.

But now the school year is all but done. He has already emptied his locker and brought home the contents, and the trapper keeper is no longer required.  He didn't even need to take a packed lunch today because it was a half day.  So this morning he eagerly set off on his bike.

Now it happened that the Girl was dragging her feet and didn't make it out of bed/into day clothes in time for the bus.  She doesn't have a bike, so I (sucker!) drove her in.  Driving away from the school just after I'd dropped her, I happened to see a familiar young fellow on a yellow bike pedalling along...he made it to school in perfect time.

Park and rides

Vacation is just two half days away now.  And today wasn't exactly a "school" day: for the Boy, a 6th Grade trip to the Town Park for swimming, fun and games; for the Girl, the 8th Grade treat was a visit to the Great Escape amusement park up at Lake George.  Grand days out, both.  The Boy has come home browner, and (more surprising) seemingly taller.

The kids in the refugee family I visit are also either out of school for the year or finishing up soon. The youngest is at the end of her first year of pre-school - when I visited today I was proudly shown her certificate of pre-school graduation, and a photo of her wearing a graduate's mortar board (which sounds silly, but for kids in a challenged community maybe it's a way to start promoting the possibility of academic achievement and college). This little girl loves going to school and has been doing well there. Last September she spoke no English at all, but now she can hold her own. When her teachers asked her what she wants to do when she grows up, she draped a stethoscope around her neck and said she'd like to be a doctor.

A sackload of fries

Now that the Boy has short hair, he likes to keep it that way.  He had been begging me to take him back to Supercuts, and finally this evening I managed it.

However, there was a long wait at the hairdressers. We left a name and number and decided to satisfy a sudden feeling of peckishness with some Five Guys fries.

There was a choice of Little, Regular and Large.  We asked how many fries came in a Regular portion, and the server held up a modest-sized paper cup.  That looks reasonable, I thought, and ordered two Regulars.

I had of course forgotten that we are in America.  Two cups were placed in the bottom of a cavernous brown paper bag.  The server scooped enough fries to fill each cup...then kept on scooping, filling the bag almost to the brim.  "That's a lot of fries," he observed, handing me the bag.

Yes, indeed.  The Boy and I sat on a grassy bank in the car park and ate as many as we could - and then hauled our bloated bellied selves across to the next shopping plaza and back to try and walk some of them off before the haircut.

Having just read online that one serving of Five Guys Regular fries contains 953 calories, I think I can safely say I will not be placing that order again.

Midsummer fun day

A perfect day today for an outdoor event - the Summer Solstice Celebration along the Helderberg-Hudson Rail Trail.

Friend J and I set up our Fair Trade table in a shady spot at what turned out to be the quieter end of the trail - but we still got to chat with many visitors (of various sizes) during the three hours of the event.  There were activities for little ones, samples of FT honey to try and a petition for local residents to sign requesting that FT products be made available at the town park snack bar.  

Meanwhile, fatigued after approximately no sleep at all, the Girl danced with her fellow Irish step-dancers (they were filmed by a camera crew and apparently made it onto the evening news).  The Boy and a friend wandered up and down the trail collecting freebies. And somewhere on another part of the trail I hope Friends of Five Rivers were having a fun and busy time with their table of "nature stuff" (furs and turtle shells and suchlike).

Hitting the deck but probably not the hay

Somehow back in April the Girl's birthday went by without her having any kind of party.  This weekend she's rectifying that.  I took her and three friends out for Japanese lunch today, then they all came home to swim and hang out.  Now they are upstairs watching a movie, and at some point they'll supposedly get ready for bed but most likely will stay up all night (why, oh why?).

In other news, we've been staining the well-swabbed and nicely dried out deck.

On your marks, get set...summer

It has been perfect weather today, ending with a comfortably cool evening, so that the Man could go off on a 40 minute run then come back and play badminton with his daughter for half an hour, and I won't say he hardly broke a sweat, but he wasn't knocked over by heat and humidity.  If the whole summer could be like this it would suit me very well.  We'll find out how summer decides to kick off here when it officially starts tomorrow, at 6:51am.

Drumming up support

There's going to be  a community event this Sunday and somehow I ended up agreeing to organize two entirely separate tables for it for two different organizations.  Luckily I did manage to enlist volunteers last night for one of them (Friends of Five Rivers), and today I just had to pull together some materials for it - I can leave the rest to others now.  But I also had to work out what's what with the second table (Fair Trade) and met with my friend J to plan it all.  Everything is in hand.  It not being my usual style, it feels a little strange to be this organized and ready so far in advance,,, (and I'll just have to hope those don't turn out to be famous last words).

Meanwhile the Boy seems to be impressing his drum teacher by composing his own percussion music, which they play together

The finals countdown

So, one of those days with a bit of Fair Trade to-do (a conference call about FT procurement policies) and some Friends of Five Rivers to-dos (Board meeting, and I had to muster volunteers for an event on Sunday), and the usual around-the-house kind of stuff.  The kids are still ploughing [or plowing] through year-end tests - but the days are heating up, pool-party invitations are coming in...  vacation-time is definitely in sight.

Fit to share

We had the kids' "Fitnessgrams" emailed to us today from school - these things come around.  Happily both of them seem to be in their correct fitness zones, though the Boy is still struggling with his trunk lifts (which makes him sound like a learner elephant).  However, the tests were taken back in October, and since then he has been lifting weights while watching telly, and playing a lot of drums, so he may be stronger by now than he was - that has certainly been his plan.

Chicken choices

Although most of us in our family are vegetarians, the Girl is a confirmed carnivore and I sometimes cook chicken for her.  I'm always perturbed when I go to buy it at Price Chopper because there are two sections next to each other and from one you are invited to buy "NATURAL CHICKEN" and in the other just "CHICKEN".

This choice begs so many questions, I don't know where to start.

Project taking years

The Girl has been putting in many hours this weekend on a "My Years" project for Social Studies.  She has had to look up news events corresponding to each year she has been alive and compile them in a little book, along with a few significant events from her own life.  Trawling through websites to pick suitable news stories was a job in itself.  Formatting on the computer and adding in photos was another.  Right now she is illustrating the pages in her own trademark style, which I fear may take her past midnight if previous efforts are anything to go by.  And then she'll have to bind all the pages together...  Her projects do tend to turn into nail-biting events for all of us.

The Boy has had a more leisurely day, much of it spent in the pool with his buddy. The water is still decidedly on the cool side, and I'm amazed they managed to stay in as long as they did.

The pressure's on...

Our very kind gadget-loving neighbour lent us his pressure washer today so that we could swab our deck. Something like that, anyway - we plan on re-staining the deck and we needed to get it clean first.

The pressure washer is a noisy thing that runs on (lots of) petrol.  You hook it up to your water supply with a hose and blast water out through an attachment on another hose.  It's like chiselling with a water jet - astonishingly fast and effective and therefore very satisfying.

Our deck is big, so it did take a while, but now we just need it to dry out thoroughly, then we'll brush it down and begin staining.

Before all that excitement we made our usual Saturday visit to the Farmers' Market, which was bustlingly busy (people glad to be out and about after days of rain).  I bought kale and beetroot, genuinely a treat for the Man for Father's Day weekend.

Unlucky for us

Today I got to do a little filling myself - well, re-grouting anyway. Some bathroom tiles needed attention.  Now they look all spiffy and new. 

Other than that it has been raining hard, for a third day, but I think that's it for now...  Ooh, no, spoke too soon: just as I was typing that the rain started coming down again, by the bucketload.  I guess we won't get to see the Friday 13th Full Moon after all.

Tigger with a drill

I had a filling this morning.  My usual dentist was not available so today I had a new guy.  It was the weirdest dental experience ever.

He was deeply enthused about dentistry, and even more enthused (I sensed) about his own dentistry skills.  I don't think I've ever met anyone so excitedly self-assured.  He kept stopping to admire his handiwork.  "Sweet!" he'd say. "Awesomeness!!" 

Sometimes he'd reflect his enthusiasm onto me.  "I'm so appreciative of your cooperation!" he told me, several times.  Why? I wondered, What am I doing that's so special? What happens with your other patients? Do they thrash about?  Do they refuse to open their mouths?

He did keep me informed about what he was up to, every awesome step of the way, which was good.  My regular dentist, who has done extensive work on me over the years, is more likely to chat about her latest trip to the Bahamas (well, it's nice to know where your money's going, isn't it?).

Day in day out such a level of self-confidence would be exhausting (for a British person not auditioning for The Apprentice, at least) to be around, but for a twenty minute experience an excited dentist was quite diverting and even enjoyable - it's the first time I've been uncomfortable in a dentist's chair from trying not to laugh. 

Rain, dance

I taught at Five Rivers today, for the first time in ages.  It could have been a lot of fun with a group of lively 2nd graders, but unfortunately we had to contend with constant rainfall for the entire two hours.  By the end the kids were wet and cold and hungry, and had really had a enough of Nature and the elements.  So that was disappointing.  Ah well.  I hope they'll get to come back to Five Rivers some sunnier day.

This evening we attended the Girl's latest Irish dance recital.  It was an enjoyable half hour performance, but Man and Girl had to dash away at the end to get somewhere else - back to the kids' very first school here so the Girl could witness her old classmates' graduation. School's out now for them, while the Girl has just a couple of weeks to go before her own Middle School era ends.

May the faucet be with you

Well, isn't it annoying when you want to fix a small part of a gadget and you find it can't be done for less than $50?  We have a fancy kitchen tap [faucet] with buttons on it to switch it from plain flow to spray mode.  I have to admit, it's quite useful. The buttons are covered with a little piece of moulded rubber, and on ours this has worn out.  What chance of spending less than a dollar to replace the little piece of rubber, since the rest of the appliance works just fine?  No chance at all - apparently if we want to fix it we'll have to shell out for a whole new tap head.  Cue long rant about the evils of built-in obsolescence.

Like I say, it's annoying.

Sleep detector

An unremarkable day, dodging rain showers and getting on with this and that. 

The Boy had us watching Sherlock on Netflix this evening, which is entertaining in a tiring kind of way - it seems to have the same effect on me as Dr.Who. I've woken up just enough to tap out this blog entry, but now I need to crawl away and finish what I'd started.

Hot and cold

Another hot day here, which the Man spent mainly in the yard, Manfully doing yard work.  I preferred the cool of the basement where there are always jobs to be done - an infinite number of boxes for sorting through, for a start.  The Girl did whatever she did, and the Boy went on a trip to Bolton Landing with his buddy and swam in Lake George.  And then he came home and swam in our own pool which is open for business (if still on the oooh side of cool).

Marketing health

As a school assignment the Girl and three friends ran a table at the farmers' market.  They were advocating on avoiding eating disorders by keeping a healthy body image.  To get people to the table they offered a bracelet making activity, and they seemed to be pretty successful.  Over the course of the morning they kept busy, handed out information, and raised more than $50 for an eating disorders charity.

Continuing the healthy theme, it's National Trails Day today, so the Man and I took in a trail at Five Rivers. An easy one, just once around the Beaver Tree Pond, but it was looking good.  Here is the beaver lodge we photographed in April as it looks now.  We didn't see any beavers.  There were lots of chipmunks about, though, even on the road as we drove there and back.

Power to the Dads

We all ended up at the kids' former elementary school tonight, for the annual Carnival.  The Girl was volunteering (two hours straight on the fishing game, with only a bag of popcorn to keep her going - that's dedication).  The Boy met up with a bunch of friends and they apparently came up with an infallible method for winning the cakewalk.  At any rate, he brought home cake. The Man and I just went along for old times' sake.  It was a lovely evening for an outdoor event.

The Boy ran into one of his old teachers, who recognized him despite his short hair. 

Later tonight, the Man and I have been watching TV via the internet, interspersed with ads for possible Father's Day gifts.  The only suggestions so far have been for power tools.  Erm , isn't that like suggesting that all a woman wants for Mother's Day is a new vacuum cleaner or a nice array of laundry detergents?  How many men really do crave power tools as gifts (not counting our friend Dr. Wallace Rockfish)?

Gridlock

Last week it was fun to take a couple of Karen friends on an outing.  This week we were back to a more frustrating scenario - trying to place a call to National Grid.

For non-local readers, National Grid is the main power supplier for this area.  My friends wanted some information sent to them and needed to speak to a human being.  But it was hard to get past the robo-operator (if that's what you call those computer-generated voices). The voice was very polite, and it did seem to understand my accent, which isn't always the case.  Or maybe I sound more American these days? Anyway, what it wouldn't do was give me any option to ask to speak to a real person.

I found my way round it in the end - I just answered every question with "I want to speak to a human!"  After a few chirpy "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that!"s, it finally put me through to someone. Whose computer then froze, so he had to transfer us to another person.  Then there was some messing about with a phoned-in "interpreter" who couldn't speak English any better than my friend so didn't much help in the communication process as he couldn't translate back to the National Grid guy.  So I ended up speaking to the latter, but apparently he couldn't understand me properly either because he ended up emailing the wrong thing and (groan) we're going to have to do it all again.

Pledge Central

I'm involved with something called the Capital Region Fair Trade Coalition, a loose association of groups and individuals working in Fair Trade in this part of the world.  To promote our work in a public-spirited kind of way, members of this Coalition contributed FT goodies to put together in five gift baskets to donate to the local public radio station, WAMC.  Today the baskets were offered as premiums in the station's June fund drive.

Now, I pretty much loathe the fund drive, when my favourite regular radio programming stops and is replaced by desperate on-air begging for as long as it takes to raise a million dollars to support the station.  However, since I do appreciate WAMC I have always thought I should probably do my bit and volunteer to man the phones sometime.  Today, with three other fair tradey friends, I finally did that.  And I have to say it was quite fun.

There were about twenty volunteers in the room (known as "Pledge Central"), with two presenters in there with us, broadcasting live.  Each volunteer had a phone, and they rang in rotation.  When my phone rang (which in all honesty was not that often over the course of two hours) I had to go through a pledge form with the caller and collect relevant details in a friendly manner.  And that was about it.  The rest of the time was spent chatting with the volunteers seated on either side of me, and enjoying freebies such as ear plugs and samples of topical pain relief (WAMC seems to know its constituent listeners and volunteers - not all of us the springiest of chickens, a bit prone to twinges of this and that). 

There was a five minute flurry of excitement for "team fair Trade" as the FT baskets went up for grabs.  They were popular and were quickly claimed at $100 a piece, so that was satisfying, especially as in the final 75 minutes of our shift there was a goal of raising $10,000, and amazingly the goal was reached - and we played a little part in that. 

On the alert

Today has been very hot, and this evening we had an almighty storm.  My (not-usually-very-smart) phone kept beeping and sending me flash flood alerts - the same announcement every five minutes.  I don't remember it ever doing that before.  When I tried to reset it to stop repeating itself, I found out that there are three alerts options: All Alerts On; Extreme Alerts Only; and Presidential Alerts.

What differentiates an Extreme Alert from a Presidential Alert, I wonder.  Or is the latter just a warning that the President is coming, better look sharp?

Extended weekend

Since the Man was working and travelling all Saturday, he took today off.  We spent the day making progress on some jobs in and around the house and yard, trying to get stuff done before the really hot weather kicks in and the school vacation begins.  Terrifyingly, the latter is now less than three weeks away...

A Capital Time

The Man writes...just back from a conference at the historic Omni-Shoreham Hotel in Washington DC.

There was very little opportunity during the week to get away from the hotel, but the Conference Dinner was held downtown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

It's always cool wandering around a museum after hours when it is empty, and "challenging" modern art seems to make much more sense to me after a beer.

 
I also got downtown for an hour or so on Saturday evening.  I made a quick return visit to the Air and Space Museum...

 where the exercise bike in Skylab looked a bit different from the ones in the Hotel fitness suite...

I walked down the National Mall. It looked wonderful, with the newly reopened Washington Memorial at one end and the United States Capitol at the other: